Rodrigo Bascunan and Christian Pearce

How does a book get nominated for literary prizes in Canada? Maybe not as obviously as you’d expect, considering how Enter the Babylon System: Unpacking Gun Culture from Samuel Colt to 50 Cent, recently earned its third shortlist honour. Published by Random House in January 2007, last week it was named as a finalist for a National Business Book Award, along with being a current contender at next week’s Donner Prize. Last fall, it was nominated for a Governor General’s Literary Award, even though it didn’t score the $25,000.

Nonetheless, the odds are good that Rodrigo Bascunan and Christian Pearce — pals from Northern Secondary School who launched their hip-hop magazine Pound straight out of university in December 1999 — will have plenty to show for this establishment-cracking hat trick. While their efforts didn’t lack for attention from media curious about a Canadian perspective on the role firearms have played in popular culture, this legitimacy can also come with genuine rewards.

Maybe not the largesse associated with Stuff White People Like — whose Toronto-born blogger scored a deal reported to be at least $350,000 for a quickie spin-off of his website — but enough to encourage co-author Pearce to consider his options after graduating from UBC law school in December. While based there, he continued to publish Pound with Bascunan — who now works as a producer for CBC’s The Hour — although the advertising support from record companies fueling their venture gradually diminished as the decade went on.

But between the rapper interviews, album reviews and fashion spreads — even if hip-hop can’t be counted on to sell records there will always be basketball shoes — was a dedication of space for journalism about the industry that could be counted on for more product-placement evocations than any other: weaponry.

Pearce set out to infiltrate events like the CANSEC Arms Fair in Ottawa, and visited Kitchener firearms and defense company Diemaco, prior to its recent acquisition by household brand name Colt. From one-page columns, to longer feature stories, the duo birthed the idea for the book at the beginning of 2004.

“The initial motivation stemmed from studying political science at Wilfred Laurier University,” says Pearce. “There were always plenty of references to nuclear industry, for example, but you’d never see newspapers covering the companies in Canada— because the issues were usually too complex for a 500-word story.

“And it’s the same thing with guns. When the employees at Para-Ordinance, the manufacturer in Scarborough, had parts traced to guns found trafficked in Toronto a couple years ago, you’d see a passing reference to it — and that’s all.”

This thinking led the Pound pair to shop a proposal, without an agent — although Pearce had access to advice as a law student — and ended up with three houses bidding for their book: HarperCollins and McClelland & Stewart were eager suitors, but the duo opted for Random House as editor Craig Pyette provided what they felt was the most constructive input. Money, too, although this was a Canadian deal: “I can’t tell you what exactly the advance was,” says Pearce, “but let’s just say it was somewhere around one-tenth of what that Stuff White People Like guy got.”

That was for two authors, too, splitting up research tasks that included Bascunan traveling through Las Vegas, Houston and Oakland to explore the gun culture that ricochets up to the American east coast, and ends up landing around here.

“The book was almost entirely motivated by the myths that Canadians are told about the gun problem. There was all that stuff about ‘The Year of the Gun’ while we were working on it in 2005, but few were addressing how it really happened.

“You read about the United States like it’s all one homogenous thing, but the perspective on firearms in Houston was a lot different than it is in New Jersey.”

A critical view that isn’t dismissive of the music and movies where guns are glorified is a tricky enough balance that Enter the Babylon System hasn’t been published in the US. And while the book has been optioned for an American documentary, Pearce doesn’t mind if its conclusions are confined to Canada.

“It would be a good idea to ban handguns here altogether, just to see how much the US is feeding into this problem — then, after 10 years, we can draw a reasonable conclusion about where the problem is coming from and weigh that.”  

This week, Mayor David Miller has launched an online petition and YouTube video in his campaign to restrict handguns to police and military in this country.

Enter the Babylon System briefly earned Canadian hardcover best-seller list status — a somewhat arbitrary ranking where 5,000 copies sold in a year is considered a hit — although Pearce doesn’t even think that any one promotional appearance directly translated to sales. Random House is more hopeful that the new paperback edition will expand its reach. Scoring one or both of the literary awards being handed out in the next two weeks would also be a natural boost.

The Donner Prize is awarded to what a five-member jury considers the year’s best book on Canadian public policy — which means the other four nominated titles are pretty much what you’d expect, even though another nominee in the lot is Young Thugs: Inside the Dangerous World of Canadian Street Gangs. The winning book gets $35,000, with $5,000 promised for each of the runners-up.

For the $20,000 National Business Book Award, Babylon System is competing against a more eclectic lot including two other writers in their 30s: The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein and The Geography of Hope by Chris Turner, and titles on Lord Beaverbrook’s art collection and environmental Armageddon in Alberta.

But it’s the book that originated in the pages of a hip-hop magazine, with a title inspired by Bob Marley, that seems the most unlikely to get feted on this level.

“There are still a lot of holes to fill in this country far as investigative journalism is concerned,” says Pearce. “And there are plenty of talented people who are capable of making that happen — not just Rodrigo and I — if they get the chance.

“Then again, I went to the Business Development Bank of Canada with a proposal last year, and I was rejected because I was told the idea was ‘too gangster.' And, when I asked them to elaborate, they said they didn’t have to.”

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